


Those Who Favor Fire

by montycrowley



Category: Doctor Who, Harry Potter - Rowling
Genre: &magnets, Dark Crack
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-01-20
Updated: 2010-01-20
Packaged: 2017-10-06 12:10:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,819
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/53514
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/montycrowley/pseuds/montycrowley
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There's no protocol for this, no plan, nothing like Step One: Betray Your People. Step Two: End The World And Doom Your Race to An Unbreakable Time-Lock. Step Three: Die Alone. Step Four: At Some Point, Regenerate. Step Five: Seek Out and Eat Marmalade. Step Six: Get Dressed, Find Something to Do With the Rest of Your Lives. So when the Ninth Doctor meets the Boy who Burned the World, shit gets real.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Those Who Favor Fire

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ishie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ishie/gifts).



> So I participated in the help_haiti Fandom Auction to raise money to help Haiti recover. And um. You guys have been incredible.
> 
> ishie donated $10.00 to Partners in Health. She asked for 1000 words of crack. Her prompt was "Before the Ninth Doctor met Rose, he had adventures with a mopey kid with messy hair and the most ridiculous scar ever." I also took this to mean &amp;MAGNETS. She gets 2700 words of dark crack and an IOU for another go, if she doesn't like this one. Which I can well understand. Thanks, ishie. You are glorious.

_  
Some say the world will end in fire,  
Some say in ice._

From what I've tasted of desire  
I hold with those who favor fire.

But if it had to perish twice,  
I think I know enough of hate  
To say that for destruction ice  
Is also great

And would suffice.  


\-- robert frost  
======

(He'd always used to love to tell stories. And to read them. Fiction, mostly. He used to love fiction. At one point, he even got a proper card at the Library instead of just using the psychic paper. He got the user account and everything, kept the little card in his pocket. Learned how difficult it was to return materials by the due dates, even for a time traveler.)

===========

The first thing he does, he smashes all the mirrors without looking in a single one, and there is a lot of screaming.

Then there's a sort of emptiness that quite possibly lasts for years -

A void, where grief and horror should go, and the only thing he remembers is finding an ancient and terrible jar of marmalade that's rolled under the console - it's probably been there since his first _life_ - and for some reason he eats it ravenously, with his fingers, picking the bits of orange rind out from under his short blunt fingernails and eating them too. He licks the ancient crusty stuff off the lid and - 

The ninth or tenth thing he does, he tries to find clothes that fit - a velvet jacket suddenly too snug around shoulders that must be very broad. He finds himself in a leather jacket, dark and heavy and smelling, fittingly, of sour ash. Where does he even get these clothes -

He finds himself at the console, looking down at things that used to mean a lot to him. Something about a handbrake. Something about -

It's so hard to finish -

Perhaps he isn't as reliable of a narrator as he'd always thought. One day soon, he'll have to gather up the grandchildren - surely there are a couple by now! he really ought to check - and tell them these things before he forgets completely. _One day your grandfather stole a Tardis to see where the worlds ended, and when he couldn't find it he went looking for all the other wheres that might be, and then he looked for the whys and the hows and the whens and the whos, and they called him the-_

The grandchildren. 

Oh, that's cruel, to have _almost_ forgotten, and then to remember that there aren't any grandchildren, and won't be, not anymore.

There's no protocol for this, no plan, nothing like _Step One: Betray Your People. Step Two: End The World And Doom Your Race to An Unbreakable Time-Lock. Step Three: Die Alone. Step Four: At Some Point, Regenerate. Step Five: Seek Out and Eat Marmalade. Step Six: Get Dressed, Find Something to Do With the Rest of Your Lives._

Perhaps he simply doesn't have the metabolic pathways to grieve.

======================

At some point he's either crashed or landed, and the TARDIS howls and judders in affront for some reason, and the only thought he spares (for the machine that he once loved) is best summarized as _whatever._

It appears that there is a world outside. (It's probably England. It usually is. That's where they go, he and his TARDIS - _the_ TARDIS, now, she's the last of her kind too, isn't she? - like those pigeons on Earth with those secret magnets inside that always find their way home, unless he's making that up.)

Outside it's snow, dark, slush, has travel always been this shitty? He tries to find the old spark, _there could be anything out there!_ 

_(except Time Lords)_

but no, those thoughts don't go there.

A human would think: _England! Let's go see it. Let's get in trouble. What's the worst that can happen? _

That's it. That's the way out of this; he'll walk the worlds like a human does, a thin clear vessel with a narrow thread of heartbeat, one thought in front of another, one life in front of another, and then -

and then what?

Ah, yes, then you die.

He will walk out into the snow, he decides, and will see what might be out there, in the silence and the shitty slush of good old solid unchanging England. And how ironic that, in all of time and space and glory, the closest thing he has to home is a soggy scrap of rock on an unremarkable planet that everybody sort of overlooks.

He will walk out into the snow and perhaps he will find out how humans learn to die.

=====================

Instead he finds a boy.

Three steps outside of the TARDIS, and nanoseconds into this latest resolution, and there, _of course_, is a bedraggled sort of human, poised to knock on the door of the police box, looking at him with wide green eyes.

"No," he tells it, and goes back inside, and shuts the door.

It's so predictable, he almost counts off the heartbeats. Then the knock comes on the door. Humans!

"No," he tells the boy, opening the door a crack. "Go away. We don't want any."

Is that what his voice sounds like now? He's not heard it before. It feels slightly ridiculous not to recognize his own voice. He glowers, unsure of how the expression sits on his face. 

The child stares at him. It appears to consist mostly of a huge and hideous scarf, staring green eyes, and a tangle of rumpled black curls that might be a symbiotic head-creature or a hat or even some kind of terrible haircut or -

"Is this a police box?" the boy is asking. His voice is the high-pitched metallic chirp of human youth, but precisely clipped, as if he's trying to sound like an adult.

"What does it look like?"

"Only, I've read about them, and I think they were largely declared to be extinct."

He looks at the boy and a laugh catches roughly at the back of his throat, manic and unwanted. "They are, in the wild," he says.

This seems to be enough for the child, who nods once solemnly. "Are you the Doctor?"

It shocks him, for some reason, to hear it said aloud.

"I have a book with a picture of you in it," the boy says. "You look different." He pushes the scarf down a bit, revealing a pale, pointed face with a stubborn sharp little chin. And a neat, pink, perfect little scar.

"Oh," the Doctor says weakly when he sees. "You wouldn't happen to be a wizard, would you?" 

"Yes," the boy says with some composure. He's trying to peer inside the police box, but he's too short. 

"Shouldn't you be in... school? Hogwarts, is it?"

"I suppose. I don't really go." The boy cranes his neck, eyes shining bright under the rough fringe of black hair, and that is indeed the famous scar.

There are some people that time travelers hope never to meet.

The Doctor draws a shuddering breath. 

"Come in," he tells the Boy who Burned the World.

============

The Doctor rarely travels with wizards. He doesn't think of them as proper humans. It's not the faint throwback threads of alien genes that he's reacting to, it's the arrogance, the insularity, the entitlement - the slow tumble of a once-great society. They're too much like Time Lords, a thought that hurts, now.

This is sick, having this boy here. Especially now. Would there ever be a good time to have him? The Doctor is not used to having mass murderers in for tea.

The murderer sits in the kitchen (he has a kitchen! who knew?) and the melting snow from his mittens and scarf forms a grimy puddle on the floor beneath him. The murderer eats some biscuits that the Doctor picked up in a market on Alpha Centauri. He looks at the Doctor with wide, frank green eyes. There are crumbs about the murderer's mouth.

"Why the staring?" the boy asks finally. "Are you one of my da's crazy fans? Or are you a creeper."

The Doctor wants to ask, _What's it like, being you?_ but he doesn't know how a human would take that. He wants to know if the weight of destiny crushes, or if it's comforting, like a heavy leather jacket.

He says, instead, "Tell me about your scar."

The boy looks at him oddly. "When I was a baby, my brother James put me on his broom and I knocked into the balustrade."

_What's it like, being Albus Severus Potter? What do you see in the mirror?_

===========

"You can't Apparate within the boundaries of Hogwarts." The child _does_ go on and on, in that oddly grating fake-grownup voice; maybe that's why it'll all go wrong. What authority figure could stand to listen to him? Perhaps he goes Dark because nobody can bear to pay attention.

The TARDIS touches down on some sort of crenelated rooftop. 

"Be good," he says vaguely. "Stay in school. Be nice to your friends. Don't do... drugs, or things. Be kind to animals. Even shitty ones like geese."

The child stares at him. Destiny looks out of those wide blank green eyes, swirling cold and inevitable. A chuckle ringing through time and space. Destiny doesn't care who it uses. Doesn't he know that by now? Shouldn't he have learned?

"Go on," the Doctor says. Dread makes the back of his throat feel cold and numb, and his heartbeats are out of rhythm. "Go to your school."

He says, helplessly, irony curdling in his stomach, "Be good."

===========

The Doctor goes back into the Spontaneous TARDIS Kitchen and stares moodily at boy's muddy boot-prints on the floor, the crumbs mashed into corners, the dirty cup half-full of tea.

An abandoned mitten.

The Doctor stares at it in unwarranted horror. 

True, it's lumpy and obviously handmade; true, it was apparently handmade by a colorblind badger with a tertiary understanding of how human thumbs work. 

But the Doctor looks at the mitten and he begins to remember a piece of a story.

"No," he says, "No, no, _no,_ nonono-"

===========

The Doctor hasn't been to the Library in - oh, lifetimes. Civilizations have fallen. He's gotten a different haircut. A different face.

So it seems unfair that the biometric readings on his library card recognize him and announce, loudly, that he last visited six hundred and thirty-four years ago, and that he has racked up an impressive balance of overdue fines. It's a very significant-sounding number, and as the Node recites it, he can't help but notice that it's got zeroes in all the wrong places.

"That can't be right," he says, "That must be the entire operating budget of the Library."

"-Seven thousand, four hundred and eighty-"

The Doctor makes an executive decision, turning on his heel and walking away.

He finds himself at the circulation desk.

"The Eighth Harry Potter?" the Librarian slides her glasses down her nose to reveal her shiny black eyes, the better to stare at him disbelievingly with. "Nobody ever asks for _that._ It's too upsetting."

"I cried," the Doctor says frankly.

"Who didn't?" She stands up, legs unfolding like complicated origami, and steps sedately to a locked cabinet. When she breaks the airseal, he catches a glimpse of a journal bound in blue leather that strikes him as rather attractive, but the Librarian's already reaching for a thick old paper book. 

"Sign this waiver," the Librarian instructs. "I must inform you that the contents of this book exceed the maximum yearly recommended dose of sorrow."

The Doctor signs his name "Terznaf Apologinak" without a smidgen of guilt.

"Side effects of this book may include angst, ennui, anomie, feelings of alienation-"

"I think I'll be able to handle it," he says, flipping quickly through the pages. "Thanks."

===========

When he comes to the passage he's looking for, it occurs to him that he needs a woman's opinion. A humanoid woman, for preference. A girl is perched in a study carrel, a sort of slim bookish-looking thing with a quantity of dark curly hair - she'll have to do. He runs up to her, waving the book.

"This is important," he pants. "Am I a tall, dark man?"

"Yeees," the girl says tentatively.

"What are my ears like?"

The face she makes can only be described as _polite_. "Don't you know?"

"I've never seen a mirror in my life."

"Oh," she says delicately. "Well, they're - they're charming! Very ... _distinctive._"

"Ha!" The noise he makes is both bitter and exultant. "_Fantastic._Distinctive, you'd definitely say distinctive?"

"Definitely distinctive." She tips her head to read the title. "Oh,_Albus Potter and the Plague Hunters_. That's my favorite book. I love the part when-"

"Spoilers," he snaps. 

She seems confused. "The Eighth Harry Potter's been out for thirty centuries."

"I don't care," he says, "It's rude. Thank you for calling my ears distinctive. Goodbye."

"Can I give you my number?" she calls. Running after him, she presses a biometric card into his hand and beams up at him. Just another human being filled with brittle light.

"My name's River," she says, and makes a charmingly archaic gesture, with her pinky finger and thumb held to her mouth and ear like the handset of an ancient telephone. "Call me?"

He dismisses her with a shake of his head and strides past. "I have a chapter to be in."

===========

"And here you are, Doctor," Albus Severus Potter says, wand raised, a mad light in his wild green eyes, the scar livid across his face and throat. "Here you are, come to stop me with a mitten."

"A mitten and more than a mitten!" He spreads his arms wide and answers the boy with a grin. For the first time in this body, he feels like _himself._ "A metaphor."

"A metaphor? For what?"

"Mercy," the Doctor says. "Memory. Oh, alliteration, I _like_ that. _Once upon a time, there was a boy named Albus Severus Potter, who was no more or less special than his brother or his sister. But he was decidedly less special than his father, who was, unfortunately famous._"

Albus stops dead, white to the lips. "What is that?" he bites out.

"It's a story," the Doctor tells him. "Here's another bit. _And Albus stood over the body of his friend, and it didn't seem real or fair that he should be dead, when so many less worthy were not. When a summer ago they'd been holding hands and running and laughing, and Albus had thought for a moment that he was truly happy. When a minute ago, Scorpius had been alive and angry, and now he was cold and still, his blonde hair spilled on the-"_

"Shut up," Albus cries, his wand aimed at the Doctor's throat.

"You're right," the Doctor says, "It's melodramatic. Here's the part I like best: _The man was tall, and dark, and he had distinctive ears; Albus had the distinct impression that he'd seen him, before, a long time ago._" He stops and gestures up and down, inviting Albus to take in his height, his coloration, and his ears. "Yes? No? Well. I'll go on, I've got the book here. _And the man brought him a mitten, a mitten that Albus had lost long ago, and said, "Listen, you little cunt, while I tell you a long story about mercy."_"

=========

"His hair was golden in the light," Albus says thickly. "I grabbed his hand and ran, and it seemed like we could run for ever. Like we were stealing something from the world."

"Ah," says the Doctor, neutrally.

"I'd burn the world that doesn't have him in it."

"Hm," says the Doctor. "More tea?" He turns his back and fusses with the hob to give the boy a bit of space to cry in.

Albus Severus Potter sits in a kitchen in the TARDIS and cries. He's twenty-three years old, and he's raised a militia of Muggles to wipe the Wizarding race out of Britain, and he's killed nearly everyone who stood in his way. He's just killed his best and only friend and burned down his childhood home. 

The Doctor sets the kettle down carefully and says, "There _is_ another way."

========

(Some time later, after Albus goes to war as a Centurion and the Doctor has to go to the Silvered Gardens of Sagitaria to forget the look in his eyes - after that business with the Titanic and that whole Boston Tea Party thing - the Doctor remembers to return his library books.

Instead he ends up in a department store with a sort of blonde girl who seems to cram far too many teeth into her smile. And when he grabs her hand and runs, it seems like they can run forever - like they're stealing that from the world.

He's glad he never read the end of the Eighth Harry Potter Book. He doesn't like endings - not at all.)


End file.
